“Now you know, Lucas.”
“There’s a whole class of places like this. They wait for you as patiently as Medusa.”
“Come on, Lucas, don’t be spoilt.”
Eventually we fetched up in the rain in front of the War Memorial. By that time it was only twenty minutes to wait for the train. Lucas was still tense but I could feel him relaxing. “‘Their name liveth for ever more’,” he quoted contemptuously. “I suppose we’re lucky it isn’t written as one word.” Out of his jacket he pulled the two volumes he had stolen from the bookshop, Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi, and the unexpurgated Journals of Anaïs Nin 1931-1934. He threw them down at the foot of the memorial in a wet flutter of pages. “Forevermore,” he said. “Forevermoreland.” With this gesture something was finally eased in him. He shivered, then laughed recklessly and pulled me away towards the station, his arm round my shoulder.
“I thought I could hear something on those stairs back there,” he admitted.
Suddenly he began to tell me how, after they were first married, he and Pam had found a wristwatch in the street. “This will show you something about us, it really will,” he said. He gripped my shoulder and went on anxiously, as if he was afraid I might not be listening: “We had this thing for six months. No one had claimed it. Neither of us had a watch of our own. But it was one of these modern things—” He moved his wrist to show me that he had one now, all these years later“—and we had no idea what to do with it. Every morning at ten o’clock the alarm went off, and we didn’t know how to stop it. Every morning at ten o’clock it read eleven, because it was still on BST; and we had no idea how to adjust it. There it was, among all the other stuff—”
I could imagine it, on the sideboard next to the telephone, one of those items carefully picked up each morning so that Lucas Medlar’s dwarf could fling them insanely about that night: the mystery novels, the coffee mugs with macaws painted on them, the artificial flowers and silvered pine cones.
“—recording some rhythm of its previous owner!”
“Lucas, you could probably have got an instruction booklet from the manufacturer.”
He shook his head impatiently.
“Listen,” he said. We were halfway across the road in front of the station; further up, some lights had released a thin stream of afternoon traffic. He stood in front of me and stopped and made me look at him.
“Listen, that isn’t the point. It was just a tinny metonym of someone else’s life. ‘Peep peep.’ We thought we’d penetrated the Heart, and we couldn’t even work a watch!”
“Lucas, we’d better get out of the road.”
He made a bitter, impatient gesture.
“You, me, Pam Stuyvesant! Together we don’t make up one whole intelligence.”
“What do you want me to say? ‘Perhaps that’s the point’? I remember Yaxley telling me, ‘If you can comprehend the Pleroma you can never experience it.’ Lucas, please let’s get out of the road!”
He looked at me with contempt. He knew that at this point I could never bear his pain.
“Believe that and you’re worse than a romantic”
“What did you expect to find in the bookshop, Lucas?” I asked him unfairly. “The Library at Alexandria?”
He walked off without answering, and I let him go. The station was deserted. I could see him wandering up and down at The far end of the platform in the streaming rain, looking first at his watch and then up the line. He coughed once or twice. He seemed all right, so I left him to it. At least he was out of the traffic. In case Pam had run out when we met, I got her a couple of packets of cigarettes from the machine on the down-platform. Then I remembered Pam was dead, and threw them one by one across the rails into the waste ground on the other side. Lucas watched this performance and then came up and said:
“I’m sorry.”
“Lucas, you always are.”
“I did expect the Library at Alexandria.”
“Lucas, you always do.”
We laughed.
“Fasten your jacket up.”
Shortly after that the pay train arrived from Silverdale. It was full of children with sore red faces who by the smell had been copiously sick just before we got on; and old men with veins like cables on the backs of their hands who walked up and down in a buckled manner carrying suitcases too heavy for them while their wives changed seats relentlessly. Lucas watched them as if they might be a message from the Pleroma, or from Pam, and then, deciding perhaps that it was impossible to decode, took a copy of The Tartar Steppe out of his briefcase and pretended to read it. A few hours later we were stumbling about on the steep windy slopes above Attermire Scar in Yorkshire, looking for a dead woman who had given Lucas the grid reference NGR 842642 but who never turned up there.
It was the last place I wanted Lucas to be. Up on the limestone you feel miles from anywhere, and he was already soaked and cold. It would be a nightmare to get him down again. He raced about in the dark in the big deteriorating amphitheatres and steep hollows above the Victoria Escarpment, putting his feet down rabbit holes and coughing helplessly. “Pam, you bitch!” he shouted. “My feet are getting wet!” But after an hour he fell asleep suddenly in the mouth of one of the bigger caves, whose cracked, water-polished walls went above him in the moonlight like something made. I put my coat over him and poked about at the foot of the Scar until I heard him call out in his sleep, “Yaxley! Yaxley!”
By morning the whole of the Ribble Valley was under mist. Like the cloud you see from an airliner above the Atlantic, it was white, impeccable, solid-seeming. It shifted restlessly, though, against the sides of the hills.
Reluctant to go down into it, we sat on some clints above Settle in the bright horizontal sunshine. Every tussock of grass had a rich luminousness. Every shadow pointed into the mist—which, where it encountered the east wind blowing down the defile between Attermire and High Hill, advanced a little, retreated a little, boiled over a stile, lay there curling back on itself and pushing out faint wisps close to the ground, exactly like the mist in a sixties film. You had no idea whether it loved or hated the things it covered; you had no idea what they might be. Eventually it began to ebb, leaving a boulder which looked like a lamb, grassy slopes glowing like sun through a bottle. Across the valley the ridge leading up to Smearsett was revealed as a long, mysterious-looking island. Behind that Ingleborough, the ancient continent, inexpressibly bleak and far away.
Lucas who had got to his feet suddenly said in a savage voice: “It was a real nightmare for her, you know. Fuck your common sense. Fuck it. You were in the Pleroma too, all those years ago!”
“Lucas—”
He stared intently out over the mist and said quickly so that I couldn’t interrupt:
“Gallica, who called herself ‘the Slave of God’ but who certainly loved Michael Neville, may not after all have died at the Carolingian Gate.” Soon he was shouting. “Many of the wounded claim to have seen her after four o’clock, in the citadel itself, where she brought them great comfort. She was glimpsed several times during the three days of massacres which followed. Michael Neville, who though he lay all that time in the heap of dead and dying in front of the Eastern Basilica never saw her himself, recorded twenty years later: ‘Wherever she moved among them the smell of blood was transformed briefly to that of attar.’”
He shivered and wiped his eyes.
“I made that up for Pam, years ago. It was a real dream. Fuck your common sense.”
“She never wanted to be the Empress, Lucas.”
Lucas looked round confusedly, exactly as he had done in the bookshop.
“She wanted to be the daughter,” I said. “Let’s go down.”
* * *
We took a wrong turn in the mist and were forced to walk for some time across rough grazing and moorland. Inside the mist it was silent, damp, cold. Lucas swayed and stumbled; he couldn’t stop shivering. I pulled his jacket round him but it didn’t seem to help. His shoes were coming to pie
ces.
“Where are we?” he kept saying. “We should be down now.” And then:
“I hate it here.”
“I know you do, Lucas.”
Suddenly we were standing at the edge of a deep Gothic ravine in the limestone, at the dry bottom of which a well-defined path curved away between overgrown screes. Half a mile or less to the south white crags rose under the gray sky, their tiers of collapsing rock like teeth in a dead gum. Northwards, the path climbed abruptly into the recesses of the cleft and vanished. Light rain had begun to fall; I could hear it pattering quietly in the little bare larchwood at the lip of the ravine. We walked in silence along the cliff edge and stood in the rain to stare at the long featureless green sweeps of moorland stretching north.
“Christ!” said Lucas. But he seemed more cheerful.
The head of the ravine was a stony cleft hardly wide enough to admit two men. There the path came up to meet us, and we followed it down until we came to a village. Ducks honked from the shallows of the stream. A woman in a headscarf and gumboots stopped gardening to watch us pass, trowel in hand. Out on the main road, we waited half an hour for the Settle bus. When it came it was empty but for one bronchitic old man and his sly red-eyed collie.
* * *
Lucas was waxy and vague with hypothermia. I got him off the bus as soon as it stopped and took him into the first café I saw. That was a mistake. Warmth, laughter, and the smell of hot fat billowed into our faces as I opened the door: a New Year party was in progress, with a dozen people from one of the local agricultural businesses shouting, laughing and singing disconnectedly at a long table down one side of the room. They were wearing paper hats quartered in red, yellow and green. They all had red, polished, cheerful faces. The floor round their feet was littered with spent Christmas crackers, crumpled serviettes and strings of dried party-foam. Two or three middle-aged women in waitress outfits—old-fashioned belted black dresses with a severe little white collar—were beginning to clear the disordered remains of a second course of roast pork and apple sauce, in preparation for the pudding. Meanwhile a boy ten or eleven years old had the job of pouring out glasses of Tetley’s for the men. A bit drunk himself, he ran about in his white shirt, little bow tie and neat black trousers asking hysterically, “Would you like a beer? Would you like a beer?” The women in the party, who had decked themselves with tinsel and mistletoe, drank white wine. Lucas stood eyeing it all with horror, while the Muzak played first a xylophone rendering of “Jingle Bells”, then “The Little Drummer Boy”. He didn’t know what to do with himself. His shoulders were hunched under the sodden cashmere jacket, and he was shivering.
“I don’t think I—”
“Lucas, at least have a cup of tea.”
I sat him down at a corner table where he turned helplessly away from the fun, his upper body stiff with rejection, while bits of talk floated round his head like strips of print on a clever advertisement—
“Pass us that mistletoe, Harry!”
“Ay, old Tommy Walker. Me brother used to work for him. He lost all his fingers and half his thumb, working potato machine.”
“Cost her twenty pound.”
“No, I think they saved some of his fingers—took them in with him and sewed them back.”
“White bread! Now that’ll help your bowels come up.”
“Twenty pound? They’re having you on.”
“He needed to. He needed to. Bring it up. He probably needed to bring it up.”
“Sorry, Harry!”
“Ay lad, yer will be.”
A large man in his early fifties who had at some time lost his left arm at the elbow, Harry wore a greenish tweed jacket over a maroon pullover not quite long enough to cover his shirt, which in its turn had popped open over a belly fat, smooth and hard-looking. In his youth his face must have been straight-planed yet heavy, quick to redden in the wind, and to develop broken veins. Now it had thickened under and around the jawline, and his lively blue eyes looked out from a lapping of fat. Harry was the most animated of them all. He liked the other men to listen to him. He liked the women, to whose attention he was always bringing his missing limb, to be a little shocked at the things he said. His idea of a joke was to drain a pint of Tetley’s, exclaim loudly “Ah’m not shuwer ah enjoyed that,” and finish: “Now then! Ah’ll joost av some of that Perrier watter. Raght oop mah street.” I saw quite soon that something was going on between him and our waitress: they had some old score to settle, some business unfinished since early adulthood, perhaps even before. He would catch her eye and call challengingly across the room—
“Hey! You! Coom ’ere a minute! Ah’ve summat to tell you.”
“I bet you have, Harry. I bet you have!”
Then, to considerable laughter:
“I hope it’s nowt to do with that arm of yours.” And, with a direct look: “Because I haven’t got it!” Harry enjoyed this a good deal, and so did his friends.
She was a well-built lively woman, thirty or thirty-five years old, dressed in what may have been a Monsoon frock, who in addition to waitressing took care of the till. Her eyes were direct and brown, her hair unruly, her forearms freckled. As she talked she held her body towards you, and her skin had a light, pleasant perfume.
“Somebody’s having a good time,” I said.
She looked pleased.
“Ay, we’re just this minute picking up the debris. They’ve only been in an hour and a quarter. To get them in and serve them four courses in one and a quarter hours isn’t bad.”
“I think I’ll have some tea,” I said, mainly to stop her from staring at Lucas.
She leaned her hip unselfconsciously against the back of my chair and stared at him anyway, with a kind of half-amused concern. “You’ve been in the wars,” she advised him, “and no mistake. What would you like?” Her friendliness seemed genuine, but she had never had to deal with anyone like Lucas Medlar. When he failed to respond she shrugged and told me, “Well you’ll have to order for him, won’t you? Just two teas? Nothing to eat? Right.” When she came back with the teas a few minutes later she went on: “It’s been nonstop here all week. Turkey dinners! Every single table was packed.” She paused to shout in the direction of the kitchen, “They’re still waiting at table eight!” The sound of crockery answered her. “People who didn’t even know each other were sharing tables.” She drew my attention to Lucas, who was still staring over at the party. “Are you sure your friend’s all right?”
“Leave us alone,” said Lucas distinctly.
She laughed and returned to the till. There, she fussed with some receipts, changed the Muzak tape for a selection of popular choral classics, then, with a yawn, leaned her elbows on the counter and looked out across the café. Lucas and I drank our tea. One or two old ladies finished their lunch and, complaining about the weather, went out into the darkening air. The party, contemplating an afternoon at work with a bad head, had slid into an introspective mood. Even Harry was looking into his glass, sighing, and saying, “Ay, well.” The woman behind the counter seemed amused by this. She folded her arms under her breasts and said into the silence, as if to herself but quite loudly:
“I’m sure I don’t know what I’ve done to my neck, but it’s ached since Wednesday.”
Instantly, the one-armed man was on his feet and making his way across to her.
“Ah know joost what you need!”
“Harry! No!”
Before she could avoid him, he had taken her wrist and pulled her out from behind the counter. He made her sit down on an empty table, stood behind her, and began to massage the side of her neck with his good hand. At first she laughed like a schoolgirl. Then, as his hand began to move down towards her shoulder, she let her body relax and began a pantomime of sexual arousal, looking up and back at him with large eyes, pushing her shoulder-blades back against his belly like a cat being stroked and whispering in a stage contralto—
“Oh, Harry.”
The blues and golds of her
frock glowed like a stained glass window.
“By God!” shouted the one-armed man.
He slapped his hand to his forehead, slid agilely out of his jacket and pretended to undo his braces at the front. He panted loudly. His friends cheered and laughed at this demonstration of how his missing arm had somehow granted him more vigor than ordinary people. She, meanwhile, ducked away, darted round behind him suddenly and massaged his neck in turn. Harry rolled his eyes with appreciation; lolled his head; and let his tongue hang out comically. The waitress leaned forward; gave him a quick kiss near the mouth; then, before he could reciprocate, put the counter between them again. Further cheering broke out, and while Harry was bowing to the applause she slipped away into the kitchen.
What did this exchange mean? All you could say was that it was their party piece. Harry and the waitress knew one another of old, and they had done it before, and probably other things too. I was reminded of Ward Three at the cancer hospital, where among all the other wasted, wayward old dears (like a lot of molting but cheerful parrots driven to testify at random from their smelly cage) there had been a woman called Doris. Against the odds of that place—indeed against all odds—Doris, seventy-eight years old, no hair and no teeth, pink flock dressing gown which shed all over the ward, radiotherapy implant and all, still enjoyed a rich and colorful fantasy life. “I’ll do most things,” she would carol out at the top of her voice in the middle of visiting hours, “but I won’t be buggered or bitten.” Or, “Christ, that finger’s been up two arses today. Look at it!” It was always unclear to me whether these were actually sexual memories of Doris’s, or just some kind of loosening of the internal censors in the proximity of death. Much of the time, Pam told me, Doris irritated or upset the other women on the ward. “It spoils their own memories.” But on occasion, especially in the middle of the night, when the building was full of their quiet, inturned, lunar despair, she actually seemed to give them an obscure comfort.
The Course of the Heart Page 20
